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4:05pm July 28, 2014

empresspinto:

shamlesslyfangirling replied to your post: I’ve been pretending to be something I…

That’s OK I had a time like that too, I just had to spend some time to reinvent myself and rebuild my defenses. It’ll be OK, I promise.

This is something I’ve been feeling for years. Ever since I was young I’ve had to find ways to appear allistic so as to hopefully cut down on bullying, leading to a long list of ‘rules’ that almost my entire life has gone by, building a shell of an allistic facade that suffocated what was underneath and didn’t allow it to grow, until it shriveled up and I fear there’s very little left of it, save for that which managed to entwine with the shell I had built.

Typically, a person discovers who they are and builds who they are as they grow up, but I was faking what I could and never had a chance to build myself. I can’t reinvent something that never really existed in the first place.

You don’t have to take my advice.  I don’t know you, you don’t know me.  But I wanted to say this because I know a lot of people who’ve been through something like that.  It’s a very common problem for autistic people who’ve either managed to pass, or tried very hard to pass (whether they were actually passing or not), or worked too hard to function to the point of burnout, for a long period of their life, starting very young.  

A big mistake people often make is that they try to go back and figure out who they used to be, before the pretending to be NT started.  And if it started young enough, then they’re not going to be able to remember a lot, or find a lot.  But you don’t need to find who you used to be.  You need to find who you are now.  

And I guarantee that if you care that this is happening, then that part of you that cares, that’s you.

It can be incredibly disorienting to try to discover what’s under all those layers of faking it.  And to wonder if there’s anything under there at all.

But there is always someone under there.  If there weren’t anyone under there, you wouldn’t care about any of this.  You wouldn’t be upset by it.  You wouldn’t feel anything at all about it.  The fact that you feel all this proves you exist.  And the feelings may be negative, but they're yours, and that means something important.

You don’t need to reinvent yourself, or invent yourself for that matter.  What most people seem to find works, if they really want to find themselves, is to take a lot of time dismantling the facades.  Taking them apart, dropping the act.  This can be scary, and it can even be somewhat dangerous if the act is part of what keeps you functioning.  So don’t undertake it lightly.  But if you want to be yourself, and want that really badly, then you do have to drop the act at least for awhile.

(Some people find that they drop the act, find who they are, and after that they are able to go into a situation where they can decide whether to act or not, rather than have the act take over their lives.  Others can never get the act back no matter what they do.  It’s unpredictable.)

Anyway, the more false stuff you remove, the more real stuff you will see.  And the real stuff is not who you were a long time ago, it’s not who you would’ve been if you never acted, it’s something that comes through every moment.  It’s there right now, you just can’t see it.  It takes time to be able to even detect yourself.  Who you are is something that is happening right now and only right now.  You can’t go back and find it, you can’t invent it, you have to learn to see it.  And that takes time and practice and effort, but a lot of autistic people have been through this.  It’s extremely common, I can’t emphasize enough how common it is.

I know a woman who basically put on an act throughout her entire life starting in childhood and ending in her fifties or sixties.  She spent so much energy acting that she had no idea what was actually happening to her during all that time, because all her focus was on “how do I appear normal?” and not on “What am I doing and who am I and what am I feeling and what is happening around me?" 

Her act fell apart in her fifties or sixties, I forget what caused it to fall apart, but it fell apart.  She was left with no understanding of what had happened in her life up until that time.  She had a husband that she couldn’t remember why she married.  She had a job that she couldn’t remember why she’d taken.  And all of her ability to put on an act and function like an NT had just vanished completely.  She had no idea who she was and no idea if she’d ever find out who she was.  She felt like she wasn’t even human.

But with the support of her husband (who was incredibly understanding about the whole thing, considering she barely knew him when she "woke up”), and with a lot of time and effort, she figured out who she actually was, as an autistic person.  She learned to function as an autistic person rather than as a counterfeit NT.  She got an autism diagnosis.  She has a job now that involves helping other autistic people with sensory issues.  And she’s got an entire life in the autistic community.  But most importantly, she knows who she is now, the act is gone, she lost fifty years of her life to it, but she still knows who she is now.  

Because who you are starts now.  Always now.  Whenever now is.  And you might not be able to feel it yet.  But you’re there.  And everything, all the agony you might feel about this, even if all you feel is numb, you’re still feeling, and that’s you, and that’s important.  Even if all you feel is negative to begin with, that’s still you.  I’ve seen a lot of autistic people go through this.  I’ve been through a less-intense version of it myself – and the woman I just described, she helped me through it, because she knew what it was like even more than I did, she’d been through more “lost” years than I’d even been alive.  In fact she’d been through more than twice as many “lost” years as I’d been alive when I met her.

But one thing I found is that the “lost” years aren’t really lost, because I was there.  I might not have been visible to other people, or to parts of myself, but I was there, and I can see myself now at times in my life when I couldn’t see myself at the time.  I was a person who wasn’t exactly passing (I could only pass for different kinds of abnormal, not for normal), but I was putting so much energy into functioning that it had a similar effect to people who pass.

Anyway… I know how it looks when you’re in the middle of it and you can’t see yourself, you can’t find yourself, and you don’t think you ever will.  But after having been through what I’ve been through, and after watching (to a greater and lesser extent, some watching very closely, some just from a distance) over a hundred autistic people go through the same sort of thing, most people make it through in the end and find who they are.

But the biggest mistake I’ve seen people make, again, is looking for themselves at any point other than now.  Looking for “the self I used to be” or “the self I would have been” instead of “the self I am”.  Because the self you are is the one that matters, and you can bring that into focus eventually.  It’s hard, and it’s almost impossible to explain how to do it, but it can be done, and it is done by autistic people every single day.

One thing that I had to do that was very important was to remove myself from all relationships where people wanted me to be someone I wasn’t, or where people had a negative influence on me.  That meant cutting a lot of ties at once and becoming very isolated for a long time.  I was lucky to have someone from the autistic community who took on a mentor role – a real mentor role, not the bullshit pre-packaged Mentors-R-Us™ thing.  She’s now like my second mother.  She guided me through a lot of this and that really helped.  (She’s not the same woman I described above, but that woman helped too.  There are a lot of autistic people who understand what this is like and can help to greater or lesser extents.)  But I also had someone else in the autistic community who tried to take on a mentor role without my full consent and that went very bad.  She thought she was doing the right thing but she was a very confused person herself, and she only led me in confusing directions.  So not every autistic person going through this can help, but some can.

And sometimes you find yourself and lose yourself again and find yourself and lose yourself again and that’s okay too.  It’s important to let it be okay that you don’t know certain things, that you don’t know who you are, that you don’t know more things than you do know, about who you are.  Figuring yourself out, if you undertake that process, takes time and energy and effort, it never happens all at once, it never comes easy, but everyone I know who’s managed to come out the other side says it’s more than worth it.  You don’t have to, though, if you don’t want to, or if you just can’t right now.  But it’s definitely worth trying and trying again, at least from my perspective.  For me it was like hammering my head against a brick wall and wondering why I was doing this over and over and over for years and years and years, and then one day I just sort of noticed all the progress I’d made in all that time, that I’d been unaware of because it had happened so slowly.  I’d become happier, more grounded, more aware of who I really was, and it had all snuck up on me because it happened so slowly.  When I look back on how miserable I used to be it’s hard to believe sometimes how much change has happened since I became an adult.

I hope any of this information is useful to you.  You don’t have to use any of it if you don’t want to, but I wanted to put it out there both for you and for anyone else who might be going through this who could use it.  

Because this is, unfortunately, a classic (and horrible) situation for an autistic person to end up in.  And all sorts of autistic people end up in it, from people who pass perfectly to people who have never passed but who still tried to be something they weren’t.  It makes me angry that we are pressured into this, that when we manage to lose ourselves completely we become “success stories” in the eyes of the rest of the world, that none of the people who push us into this have to deal with the wreckage when we finally wake up to the fact that we aren’t who everyone thought we were.  It makes me furious the way most autism programs encourage this, this is what the worst of behavior mod does to people, I know people whose lives were destroyed by behavior mod, I know people who basically function like robots due to behavior mod but are applauded by all the nonautistic people around them… and yet behavior mod is still one of the big things everyone uses to force us to act like someone we aren’t.  It doesn’t matter if it rips us apart inside, as long as we look normal.  (Worse, some autistic people go through behavior mod, get pronounced “cured”, and aren’t told they are autistic, until they discover autism on their own as adults, then finally their parents say “oh yeah you were autistic when you were younger but you aren’t now.”  So many things about this situation piss me off.  Sorry for ranting on your post.)